The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir

by William Friedkin

  One of Hollywood’s best stuntmen, Buddy Joe Hooker, loved the challenge of To Live and Die in L.A., and if we could pull it off, we believed it could top The French Connection chase. The best stuntmen are of course fearless, but more important, they’re well trained, cautious, and experienced. They won’t attempt anything that might obviously endanger lives, but their work itself is intrinsically dangerous. My habit of shooting off the cuff with little rehearsal doesn’t apply to a stunt sequence. Stunt coordinators know that if a serious injury occurs on their watch, they’re done. There are overzealous directors who want to push the envelope beyond the safety zone, but the top stuntmen tend to avoid these situations.

  Buddy Joe recruited a handpicked crew, and together we planned a sequence. Using toy cars on pieces of white cardboard, Buddy and I worked out options for the scene in which Chance’s car drove straight toward oncoming vehicles on a highway at high speed. For the car itself, he chose a 1985 beige Chevy Impala F41, which he refitted with roll bars, a souped-up engine, new shocks, and brakes. A duplicate car for Petersen required similar safety devices. There may be better chase sequences in films, but few as elaborate. Everything depended on precise timing. We’d come up with an idea, and Buddy Joe would figure out how to execute it so that no one was injured, or worse.

  Robbie Muller photographed most of the film, but he told me he didn’t feel confident shooting a chase. It was a matter of controlling the light; the cameras had to shoot in all directions at once, and the director of photography has to compensate for the constantly changing daylight with filters and exposures. I replaced him with one of the camera operators, Bob Yeoman, who was too young and inexperienced to be afraid of the challenge. We brought in two more operators, in addition to placing camera mounts on vehicles.

  For side-tracking shots of Chance’s car, passing traffic going the other way, we found that all the “passing cars” could be stationary; the viewer could not tell whether cars were moving or standing still.

  We parked cars along a smooth hundred-yard stretch of the Terminal Island Freeway, and Petersen could weave past them while driving. We built a swivel rig on which we mounted the Impala. The swivel was operated remotely, causing the car to twist 180 degrees while being towed on a straight path past traffic moving erratically in the other direction but far enough away for safety. Petersen did a lot of the driving himself, but Buddy Joe or one of his guys drove all the POVs. The oncoming cars, at least seventy-five, were stunt cars that we switched out for different angles. The chase was filmed in an industrial area on the Terminal Island Freeway for six consecutive weekends, four hours each day. As important as “proving” that Petersen was driving were John Pankow’s reactions of abject fear in the backseat. We made these shots from inside the car and from the swivel rig. A new camera called the “Hothead” was mounted on the hood of the Impala so we could see Petersen driving and pan the camera from a remote vehicle to see his point of view in the same shot.

  I was excited to get into the cutting room. I could tell from the dailies that this was going to work.

  Halfway through production, it occurred to me that Petersen’s character, Chance, had to die. This was not in the script or the novel, but I thought it was unexpected and justified, given that he lived constantly on the edge. He wasn’t a superhero immune to danger. In the final confrontation between Chance and Masters, it would be Chance who was killed. I didn’t have an ending until discovering during production that Vukovich becomes Chance in appearance and attitude after Chance’s death.

  In the editing room, Bud Smith and I superimposed a timeline on every scene: a typed notation on a case report, a longhand entry in a log book, and finally a digital clock counting down the last seconds of Chance’s life. This became the framework for the story and made it seem reality-based.

  The opening sequence is a montage of random shots I had no idea I would use until I got into the cutting room and their usefulness was revealed. Bud and I cut the film to the music Wang Chung recorded without seeing the footage. When we had a first cut, I invited them to the editing room. Two days later they brought me a title song—the song I had asked them not to write. I liked the song so much that I shot a new scene for it, a prologue that introduced Chance and his partner Jim Hart as agents protecting President Reagan against a terrorist attack. This was my only opportunity to portray the most important aspect of Secret Service work, protecting the president. After that, the film deals only with counterfeiting.

  The counterfeiting scene was filmed in an abandoned warehouse in the desert outside Bakersfield, California. We shot it in loving detail. One of the special effects men took home some of the bills, all twenties, printed on one side only. His teenage son grabbed a handful off his father’s bedroom dresser and with a friend bought some candy at a local supermarket. Within minutes, Secret Service agents were on the scene. They arrested the boys and asked where they got the money. The boy confessed: “From my dad.” The boy’s father was interrogated and said the bills were made for a movie, and the guy in charge of them was the property master, Barry Bedig.

  At 4:00 a.m. Barry was awakened by a pounding on the door of his apartment in Ventura: “U.S. Secret Service.” He was grilled for three hours. They wanted precise details of how and why this money was printed and how it got into circulation. Barry gave them my name and called to warn me that I’d be hearing from them. I called Gerry Petievich and asked him what I should do if I got the call.

  “They’re just a bunch of pencilnecks on a fishing expedition,” he said. “If they want to talk to you, tell ’em to get a warrant from a federal judge.”

  The next day I got a call from the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, Robert Bonner. He was pleasant on the phone: “Mr. Friedkin, I wonder if you’d mind answering a few questions?”

  “About what?” I asked him.

  A slight pause, then, “I think it would be better if we spoke in person,” he said calmly.

  “Mr. Bonner, I know you talked to my prop man and special effects man, and they told you we printed fake money for a movie.”

  “Well, you know it’s illegal to print money for any reason, unless you’re with the Government Printing Office.”

  After more urging by Bonner that I voluntarily come in for questioning, I said: “I’ll see you if you get a warrant.”

  “You’re not going to play that game, are you?” he asked.

  “Get a warrant, Mr. Bonner, and I’ll come in, with a lawyer.”

  I never heard from him again. When the film came out, there were news stories about people trying to make counterfeit money after seeing the step-by-step process in our film. I took some of the twenties, those printed on both sides of course, put them in my wallet, and spent them, in restaurants, shoe-shine parlors, and elsewhere. The money was that good.

  Robbie Muller’s camera of choice was the Arriflex BL, a compact, flexible piece of equipment with finely ground Zeiss lenses. I used the Arri on other films and appreciated its ease of operation and portability. But Robbie also decided to use Fuji Film, not Kodak stock, which was more commonly used. Robbie liked Fuji because the colors had deeper saturation. When we finished editing the work print, we cut negative and sent it to Technicolor for processing.

  The first trial prints were all out of focus. How could this be? We saw the dailies, and they seemed fine. We met with Otto Nemenz, who owned the Arriflex franchise that leased the cameras to us. He ran tests using Kodak stock, and there was no problem. Then he tested Fuji, and again we processed it at Technicolor. Again, it was out of focus. Was it possible that our entire film was out of focus? Larry Rovetti, one of Technicolor’s best color timers, discovered that Fuji negative was thicker than Kodak negative to a microscopic degree. He recalibrated a printer dedicated only to our film. The recalibration was successful, and focus was restored. Were it not for Rovetti’s skill, experience, and a hunch we would not have been able to release the film.

  I felt good about its prospects. I
believed Petersen and Dafoe would become stars, which eventually they did. Bill became the lead in CSI, the top-rated television show in the world for nine years. Dafoe went on to Academy Award nominations and international recognition.

  MGM released the film in 1985 to mostly favorable and many ecstatic reviews. Tense, exciting, and unpredictable were the most common adjectives used to describe it. Petersen was compared favorably to Steve McQueen.

  The film opened to low grosses, and MGM did nothing to support it. Ted Turner owned MGM then, and To Live and Die in L.A. wasn’t his cup of tea; he was busy colorizing classic black-and-white films for his television networks, an unpopular idea that ended badly for him when he announced he was planning to colorize Citizen Kane.

  Get out your handkerchiefs.

  I’d long since fallen from the Hollywood A-list and was in the gray area. Word came back that Tony Fantozzi, my dear friend and agent for twenty years, told several people, “Friedkin can’t get a job in this town.” It was hurtful but true, so I left the Morris office and signed with a series of agents and managers who were no more effective for me. What I had with Fantozzi and William Morris was loyalty and a devotion I haven’t experienced since. Most agents who later signed me were hoping I’d create something on my own and they could then ride my coattails. They may have made efforts on my behalf, but without results. Then again, it’s rare that an agent will work hard for a client who’s at low ebb. Failure is a disease that can spread. The agent will stop calling or return your call a day or two later. Or not at all. Like a Pinter pause, the silence is filled with meaning.

  13

  A SAFE DARKNESS

  Rampage

  It was nearly thirty years since The People vs. Paul Crump. What drew me to that story was an inherent belief that the death penalty was immoral, and the possibility that Crump was innocent. Over the years my attitude about the death penalty changed. The murders of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and John Lennon, the Manson family killings, and a series of mass murders across the country led me to the conclusion that such acts were so heinous that no purpose was served in keeping the murderers alive.

  In late 1977 a twenty-seven-year-old named Richard Chase killed five people in Sacramento. He became known as the Vampire of Sacramento, and the local sheriff called the murders the most bizarre and senseless killings he’d seen in twenty-eight years. Hysteria spread across the city until Chase was captured and charged with six counts of first-degree murder and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. His plea was denied, and he was sentenced to death but OD’d in his prison cell from antidepressants.

  Before the murders, Chase’s weird behavior caused him to be committed to a mental institution, where he was diagnosed as paranoid-schizophrenic and put on antipsychotic meds, but he escaped a year later and started his killing spree. After his capture, body parts were found scattered around his house, along with containers of brain tissue and food blenders filled with blood.

  William Wood was a deputy district attorney in the Sacramento DA’s office who had prosecuted thousands of criminals and tried fifty jury trials before he wrote Chase’s story as a novel called Rampage. It’s the story of a young man (Charles Reece) who kills random victims four days before Christmas. The novel examined not only the morality of the death penalty and the insanity defense, but issues such as justice versus revenge as well as gun control. Reece is seen easily buying a .22 with a waiting period of only fifteen days, a mere formality.

  The legal test to determine whether a person accused of a crime is sane or insane is based on English law, specifically the M’Naghten rule, first pleaded in 1843 by Daniel M’Naghten, who tried to kill the British prime minister but mistakenly killed his secretary instead. The question in M’Naghten was whether or not the accused knew what he was doing, and could distinguish right from wrong. Mental health experts testified that M’Naghten was psychotic, and he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. The U.S. Supreme Court later toughened its stance on the law, writing, “The fact that a defendant’s conduct can be characterized as bizarre or shocking does not compel a finding of legal insanity, particularly when there is expert testimony supporting an opposite conclusion.”

  Today the defense is seldom used and rarely successful.

  The question raised by Wood’s novel that most intrigued me: What factors cause someone to snap and commit mass murder? Often his friends, neighbors, or relatives will later say, “He was a really good boy, quiet, polite. I never saw it coming—would never have believed he could do it.”

  I optioned the rights to Bill Wood’s book and wrote a screenplay in four weeks. I took it to Dino De Laurentiis, who’d produced The Brink’s Job almost ten years before. Dino was a battle-scarred warrior who made hundreds of films in Italy, the United States, and around the world. He scored a success with David Lynch’s strange, disturbing film Blue Velvet, and he now had his own distribution company. He thought Rampage, if done inexpensively, could tap into the same audience.

  Dino started as a spaghetti salesman in Naples and became a film producer in 1940 at the age of twenty-one. For seven decades he worked with people like Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, and John Huston, making everything from comedies to horror films. Some were acclaimed; many were dogs. He was a diminutive man with a large ego who wanted to compete with the big boys, the major Hollywood studios, but his finances were often questionable, and he was not a hands-on producer. He agreed to make Rampage for $5 million, on location in Stockton, California, with no stars. I cast Michael Biehn, who played a leading role in James Cameron’s film The Terminator, as a liberal young district attorney who is personally against the death penalty but must invoke it in a first-degree murder case under California law. In preparing the case, he covers up inept police work to prevent the killer from getting off on a technicality. Alex McArthur, who had only a handful of television credits but was a fine actor, played the role of Charles Reece. Wood’s novel was dispassionate, more of a procedural than a hard-edged drama. It was a polemic against the insanity defense by a former prosecutor. My adaptation followed the novel closely, but I felt that in dealing with so serious a subject, I had to be accurate in portraying the methods then in use to determine psychotic behavior and brain damage. I probably focused more on the psychological aspect than the drama.

  I heard about a behavioral science research program at the Isaac Ray Center of the Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago. The program was truly experimental and controversial. Its founders were Dr. James Cavanaugh Jr. and Dr. Katie Busch, forensic psychiatrists who had done studies of multiple personality disorder. They were treating six men, convicted of multiple murder and sentenced to death, who were released from prison and reintegrated into the community. These men became part of an outpatient program at the Isaac Ray Center, where they were studied and given drugs and therapy. I contacted Dr. Cavanaugh, and he allowed me to visit the center and observe the program. The murderers underwent positron emission tomography (PET) scans, high-tech imaging that showed that the chemistry of their brains was different from that of a “normal” brain in example after example. The patients had to appear at the Center only once a week for a session with a therapist. The rest of the time they lived on their own, unsupervised, and held jobs in Chicago, interacting with people who knew nothing of their personal lives. One of the men I observed was convicted of killing his mother in cold blood. When I met him, he held a full-time job as a security guard at the Field Museum. He began a relationship with a woman at work and sought Dr. Cavanaugh’s advice as to whether he should tell her about his past. The doctor suggested he wait and see how the relationship evolved.

  I sat in on a Rorschach test Dr. Cavanaugh administered to this man. I saw only demons and monsters in the Rorschach cards while this convicted murderer saw butterflies and angels. Clearly there was something wrong with me. Dr. Cavanaugh theorized that his patients’ belief in demons was as real as their repre
ssion of childhood trauma.

  The PET scans appeared to show that insanity could be identified. I put what I had observed into the film, which was finished in 1987. There is a courtroom sequence in which I had the prosecuting attorney turn on a stopwatch for two full minutes to help the jury imagine what it was like for one of the victims to die slowly in that period of time. The two minutes of silence seemed endless, with just the sound of the stopwatch ticking over shots of the jury, the relatives of the victims, the judge, both lawyers, and the murderer. The film contains some of the most visceral scenes I’ve ever filmed, and resembles the straight documentary style I used in my earliest films, but the atmosphere on the set was often depressing because of the subject matter. I didn’t portray the murders graphically, but they were powerfully evoked.

  The most enjoyable part of making the film was when I took it to Rome and showed it to Ennio Morricone, who agreed to write and conduct the music score. He had written scores for literally hundreds of films. I doubt even he knows how many. He’s best known for the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, and I wanted a similar high-energy track for Rampage, but Morricone wrote a more pensive score underlining the tragedy left in the wake of the murders. What he wrote is haunting, and I loved working with him. The film had no problem getting an R rating with no cuts.